Idiom Translation in the Financial Press

Book excerpt: Bringing together disciplines such as news translation, media studies, linguistics and financial discourse, this book addresses the issue of English-Greek idiom translation in the news press. It adopts a novel idiom-typology which draws its main concepts from psychology and gives a detailed description of the idiom-translation strategies employed in the Greek financial press. More specifically, this book explores the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic changes that idioms undergo when they are translated and proposes possible parameters that license a particular idiom-translation strategy to be used in preference to another. It is suggested that the four major tendencies dominant in idiom translation, namely idiom adherence, literalization, deletion and compensation, are determined by syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, cognitive and textual parameters. On these grounds, a new idiom-translation model is presented where it is assumed that idiom translation is genre-sensitive, thus pointing to the context-sensitive nature of idiom translation expected to influence the translation quality of genres.